Columnist Robert Novak, who started
the Wilson-Plame flack by reporting in his syndicated column that Wilson's
wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame-Wilson, had recommended to then-CIA
Director George Tenet that he should send her husband to investigate
reports coming out of Niger that Saddam Hussein was attempting to buy
yellow cake uranium. Plame-Wilson told Tenet that Wilson "...has good
relations with the both the PM (prime minister) and the former Minister
of Mines (not to mention a lot of French contacts), both of whom could
possibly shed light on this sort of activity." Plame-Wilson's comments
were included in an inter-agency memo in 2002.

Novak did not pick up on the story
until Wilson wrote an op ed piece for the New York Times denigrating
President George E. Bush for his decision to launch an attack against
Iraq that was based, in part, on a British MI-5 report that claimed
Saddam was trying to buy enriched uranium�a claim Wilson said was false.
Not only was it false, Wilson insisted, but the Bush people knew it
was false because he had been sent to Niger by CIA Director George Tenet
to check out the story. Wilson said he confirmed, through U.S. Ambassador
Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, that the story was false. Owens-Kirkpatrick
admitted to Wilson that she was told by a Nigerian official that Saddam
was attempting to buy yellowcake (enriched) uranium. And, without any
evidence to suggest the official was wrong, Owens-Kirkpatrick chose
to believe that the report was false and sent her own report to Washington
noting the existence of the "rumor," but claiming that her office had
thoroughly investigated the rumor and found it to be groundless. It
was not until the British notified Washington that Saddam was attempting
to buy enriched uranium from the Nigerians that Bush-43 decided to send
a CIA operative to Niger to find out.

Tenet erred in a major way by agreeing
to send a very partisan Clinton liberal bureaucrat on a mission that
actually required a nonpartisan intelligence operative. The Democrats,
who had been hammering Bush-43 about a handful of words in his 2003
State-of-the Union address, saw the opportunity to put a large chink
in his armor. The liberal media lionized Wilson much the same way it
lionized Richard Clarke in the opening days of the 9-11 Commission hearings.
Wilson, who investigated nothing in Niger beyond speaking with Owens-Kirkpatrick,
was accepted by the ultra-liberal, not-so-credible New York Times as
being truthfully honest and Bush, who acted preemptively to protect
the American people based on the best available intelligence, was branded
by the liberal media as a liar with something to hide. In reality, from
hindsight it appears that the only person with something to hide was
Wilson who was stumping his new book and needed the controversy to spark
sales. The same was true with Clarke, the Clinton-hack who gave us Y2-K.
Clarke was likewise proven to be as incorrect in his assessments of
terrorist threats. Clarke, like Wilson, was also touting a book. Clarke
painted himself as the seer who accurately predicted 9-11 a year before
it happened when he made some vague, Nostradamus-like rantings that
could have applied to 100 different nondescript things�the least of
which would have been 9-11.

The Democrats on the US Senate Select
Intelligence Committee have been reluctantly forced to conclude [a]
that the Bush Administration did not have enough pre-9-11 intelligence
to predict that Muslim terrorists would seize jet airliners full of
passengers and crash them into landmark buildings in the United States,
and [b] that the intelligence received by the Bush people clearly and
irrefutably suggested that Saddam was actively attempting to secure
enriched uranium in order to produce nuclear weapons. That same intelligence
suggested that Iraq already possessed a stockpile of both chemical and
biological weapons. Bush, like any president with guts, acted preemptively
to protect the people and the infrastructure of the United States.

Furthermore, after listening to Wilson's
testimony to the 9-11 Commission (based largely on the material in his
book) the 9-11 Commission and the Senate Select Intelligence Committee
were both forced to concede that the CIA report on Wilson's mission
to Niger differed substantially from his testimony to the 9-11 Commission.
Wilson's report to the CIA, according to a Chicago Sun-Times report
by Bob Novak, "...did not refute the possibility that Iraq had approached
Niger to purchase [yellowcake uranium]." With respect to Wilson's statement
to the Washington Post about 'forged documents" involved in the alleged
attempt by Iraq to buy uranium�a bombshell that is apparently in his
book�Wilson admitted to the 9-11 Committee that he may have exaggerated.
The 9-11 Committee found conclusively that Iraq was attempting to procure
enriched (yellowcake) uranium in Africa.

Because the conclusions of the 9-11
Commission and the findings of the supposedly nonpartisan US Senate
Select Intelligence Committee debunked both Clarke and Wilson, the Democrats
on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee led by Sen. John D. Rockefeller
IV wanted a watered-down report that neither condemned nor exonerated
the White House while not criticizing either Wilson or Clarke whom they
characterized as victims of the Bush Administration in order, one imagines,
to maintain their nonpartisan appearance.

Not content with a Democratic whitewash
that sought to mitigate the erroneous testimony of Clarke and Wilson
by simply labeling their falsehoods as personal views (which by extension
makes Bush appear guilty), Senate Select Intelligence Committee chairman
Pat Roberts issued his own scathing statement noting that rather than
confining his comments about what actually happened when he went, as
a agent of the US government, to Niger on a fact-finding mission, Roberts
observed that "...the former ambassador seems to have included information
he learned from press accounts and from his beliefs about how the intelligence
community would have or should have handled the information he provided...Time
and again Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen that the president
had lied to the American people, that the vice president had lied, and
that he had 'debunked' the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from
Africa...[N]ot only did he NOT 'debunk' the claim, he actually gave
some intelligence analysts even more reason to believe [the MI-5 story
was] true." In concluding, Roberts noted that much of what Wilson had
to say contained absolutely no basis of fact. But, when you are a Democrat
throwing stones, one rock is just as good as any other rock�until you
look at them and discover that some of them are petrified cow poop.

Jon Christian Ryter is the pseudonym of a
former newspaper reporter with the Parkersburg, WV Sentinel. He authored
a syndicated newspaper column, Answers From The Bible, from the mid-1970s
until 1985. Answers From The Bible was read weekly in many suburban
markets in the United States.

Today, Jon is an advertising
executive with the Washington Times. His website, www.jonchristianryter.com
has helped him establish a network of mid-to senior-level Washington
insiders who now provide him with a steady stream of material for
use both in his books and in the investigative reports that are found
on his website. E-Mail: [email protected]